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Image courtesy of Pitt Street Poetry.
John Foulcher John Foulcher i(A11226 works by) (birth name: John Stephen Foulcher)
Born: Established: 1952 Ryde, Ryde - Gladesville - Hunters Hill area, Northwest Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

John Foulcher graduated from Macquarie University with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours and a Diploma of Education. He has been a teacher in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

Foulcher's work has been widely anthologised, and published extensively in national newspapers and journals, including the Age, the Bulletin, Quadrant, Poetry Australia and Overland. Foulcher's work often focuses on such subjects as family relationships, coping with grief, and the mysterious and unknowable future. His poetry has been described by the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature as 'simple, direct and convincing'.

In 1993, Foulcher was poetry editor of the National Library's Voices, and from 1986 to 1994 his poetry was set for study on the NSW Higher School Certificate syllabus.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2020 shortlisted The Newcastle Poetry Prize for 'Annotations'.
2020 shortlisted The Newcastle Poetry Prize for 'The Babel of Rites'.
2019 shortlisted Peter Porter Poetry Prize for 'Dancing with Stephen Hawking'.

Awards for Works

Absence i "I sold what little soul I have", 2023 single work poetry
— Appears in: Love : 2023 ACU Prize for Poetry 2023; (p. 29-31)
2023 highly commended ACU Prize for Poetry
The Girls Become 2022 sequence poetry
— Appears in: Island , no. 164 2022; (p. 8-9) Island Online - 2022 2022;
2021-2022 runner-up Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize
y separately published work icon Dancing with Stephen Hawking Sydney : Pitt Street Poetry , 2021 23601713 2021 selected work poetry

'This new collection of poems from magisterial Australian poet John Foulcher celebrates his recent transition from a busy working life in Canberra to the rural tranquility of a new home —a rescued church in a tiny village south of Braidwood.

'In the transition his writing takes on new depth, new breadth, new worlds, as from that quiet corner he contemplates an extended, brooding photographic sequence first encountered in London, a brief visit to a Greek island and an even briefer trip to the moon. As always in his work: aging, death, the conundrums of faith. And the transcendent importance of a momentary frenetic boogie with a quantum physicist in a wheelchair:

'. . . I thought of the atoms in my eye,
spinning and spinning, and the torrent of light
surging through me, soaking me to the bone
as I stood looking up, with my bloodied knees' (Publication summary)

2022 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards Poetry
Last amended 4 Feb 2021 11:54:38
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